Cameron’s Corner

A Musical Discovery

When I’m not traveling, performing concerts, or working on the Festival of the Sound programming with James Campbell, I am lucky enough to co-direct a chamber music series in Montreal with pianist Meagan Milatz, called HausMusique.

One of the great things about working as a team on musical programming is that one always learns of new music from the other person. Once the great classics are set aside, every musician has their own personal list of favourite “lesser-known” pieces, about which they are deeply passionate. (The challenge, of course, is then deciding who gets to present their favourite “unknown” piece first!)

Our next HausMusique concert is a piano recital by Ilya Poletaev (some of you may remember him from past Festivals!) and so it was natural that Meagan, as a pianist, would lead the programming for this concert. Above all, she was insistent that it include a work by the composer Nikolai Medtner called Sonata Reminiscenza. It was a piece she told me I absolutely had to hear.

I’ll admit, before then I had only the faintest ideas of who this “Medtner” was, and had definitely never heard of this Sonata. For better or worse, unfamiliarity seems to be a natural deterrent, and so it was only last week that I finally got around to listening to the Sonata for the first time.

I was so impressed by this new discovery that I decided I wanted to share it with all of you as well.

Medtner was a contemporary of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, and very much like these two composers, he gave pride of place to the piano in his composing. Sadly for a cellist like myself, he wrote no chamber works with cello apart from a piano quintet, which is probably why I had never come across his name!

The Sonata Reminiscenza is a fascinating and beautifully poetic piece of music. Hyper-Romantic in style, it presents the piano as a narrator spinning out intricate melodies which have the distinct soulful, almost spiritual flavour which is so unique to Russian music of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Particularly effective is the way the hypnotic opening theme returns throughout the piece: once in the middle as a brief respite between complex passagework, and again at the very end of the piece.

Below is a link to a recording by Yevgeny Sudbin, who I think has a particular affinity for this music.

Yevgeny Sudbin plays Medtner & Rachmaninoff

Rachmaninoff once called Medtner “the greatest composer of our time.” However, my sense is that today, apart from pianists and connoisseurs, his work is mostly unknown. It seems such a shame! I am glad Meagan told me that I “needed to hear” this piece, and I now pass it on to you. I hope you will enjoy and be fascinated by the discovery as much as I was.